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drchaos
06-10-2010, 10:37 PM
Hello everyone,

I recently found a business model that is doing fairly well in the USA which has yet to take off in other parts of the world.

The model is a service to aid small to medium sized business gain profession international presence without the high cost of opening remote offices.

About me:
Hi, I'm James Baxter and i have been a small business consultant for about twelve years as well as a software developer for getting closer to twenty.

I recently had a great opportunity to start a service in Vancouver very little risk in setting up or supporting the architecture. I'm here to get your honest opinions and hope to craft an excellent service for many of you. Some of which will be completely free.

Spider
06-10-2010, 11:20 PM
Welcome to the forum, James.

vangogh
06-10-2010, 11:48 PM
Welcome to the forum James. sounds like a very useful service for small business looking to build an international presence. Do you have a site? If so feel free to create a signature and link to it. If not I'm sure we'll learn more about you and your service as we get to know you.

Thanks for joining the community.

cbscreative
06-11-2010, 12:26 AM
Welcome, and we look forward to learning more from you.

Business Attorney
06-11-2010, 09:58 AM
Hello, James and welcome to the forum. I'll be interested to here more about your concept.

KristineS
06-11-2010, 11:50 AM
Welcome to the forum James.

drchaos
06-16-2010, 12:57 AM
Thank you for the warm welcome everyone!

I look forward to hearing your comments and hopefully in helping to grow some businesses together.

I don't have a website as of yet, but i am happy to point you to my business model. The service in the USA which i have spoken about is USA2Me (http://www.usa2me.com/site/default.aspx). My colleges have used their services for several months now and have been very happy with their experience.

I have been researching operational costs and logistics for running a similar service in other major centers especially where rent is at a premium. The goal being to offer what would usually be out of the budget for smaller and even medium sized businesses at a very low flexible rate.

At this time I have the flexibility to know that the risk of starting this business would be very minimal and it would not be critical to make profit right away. I would rather see this become a quickly growing service at cost to get people excited. I happen to live in Vancouver and feel lucky to be here, but living here I see that starting up a local presence for a foreign company has some large barriers starting with the crazy real estate prices in this town. Who can even afford a house when the average price is half a million? Commercial space here is comparably nuts.

Of course I want this to do well for me, but i really see this as a great opportunity for everyone wanting more of a presence in major centers such as Vancouver.

Right now, I have the resources to start up without outside investment but have been working on a business plan regardless as I believe its the diligent thing to do. After all I am fooling my self if i don't think i have a lot to learn, and it may help me get some additional funds or bank loans to expedite the creation of a solid digital front-end for customers.

The goal here is to provide a hassle free, perhaps multiple language, web interface for clients to manage their accounts without need of calling in person. This will help to provide 24 support of their needs, ensure less miss-communications and make billing transparent for everyone.

Perhaps any further detail would be best placed under another forum topic where it can best be scrutinized and discussed by all interested parties.


Again,
Thank you all for your warm welcome, and i hope to get to know more of you better.

-Jim

vangogh
06-16-2010, 01:21 AM
That's an interesting business. One ups the usual PO Box when starting a business and not wanting to use your home address. Especially now with all the virtual companies that are being set up, why now go for a full virtual office.

Maybe one day we'll also be able to send virtual copies of ourselves to our virtual offices where we work all day with out virtual co-workers :)

Glad to welcome you Jim and looking forward to getting to you better as well.

hdm
06-16-2010, 01:50 AM
Good morning, Jim.

Welcome to this friendly forum. I wish you every success with your business.

Business Attorney
06-17-2010, 01:46 AM
Welcome to the forum, Jim. Your business idea sounds very doable. It's hard to know how much demand there is until you try it, but if you can keep your costs down and can afford to take the risk it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

drchaos
06-24-2010, 10:33 PM
Thank you very much for the initial positive responses. I really do hope to get this rolling, depending on costs for the initial web presence setup I may have basic services up by the end of the summer.

vangogh
06-24-2010, 10:45 PM
Glad to welcome you James. What are you looking to do to get your online presence going? Are you talking about a basic website? If so you really can have something up and running in a short amount of time without much cost. You can then go back later and improve on the original.

A domain is $10 a year, hosting is about $10 a month. You can install WordPress for free and find a free theme to change the default look. As long as you get a few pages of content written you're in business. All of the above can be done in a few hours and if you decide to hire someone to do the work it probably won't run you more than a couple or three hundred dollars.

Now if you're looking for a custom design with all sorts of backend programming yes it will run you more, but you really can have a website up and running for very little money and in very little time.